Best Online Tools to Verify if a Website Is Legit

Clicking a link is almost instinctive now. You see something on social media, in an email, or in a search result and you follow it expecting a real page, perhaps a shop, a service, or some practical information. All too often, what you find instead is a website designed to steal data or money. In the UK, recent data showed that scammers stole an estimated £9.4 billion from consumers in the past year with purchase and online scams topping the list of fraud types, and around one in five adults reporting they had been targeted by scams. Citizens Advice found that millions of British adults have been misled by fake shopping sites or counterfeit goods. These represent real losses, confusion, and time spent untangling the aftermath of a bad decision. Knowing whether a site is legitimate is a basic part of staying safe online.

A range of tools now exists to help you verify a website before you hand over personal information or card details. Some are instant safety checks that take seconds. Others work quietly in the background, scanning as you browse. One tool that many everyday users report helps in these moments of doubt is Guardio. It is available as a browser extension and supplementary security service. Guardio flags potentially unsafe sites before they load, warns about scam links, and offers alerts about suspicious activity associated with web addresses and emails. Reviewers say this gives them confidence when they err towards caution. Guardio’s design aims to protect every account, platform, and device you use, tying together many signals of risk into a consistent set of warnings. 

In addition to Guardio, other widely used options include the Google Safe Browsing system built into most web browsers, the ScamAdviser website checker that gives an algorithmic trust score based on traffic and technical signals, ESET Link Checker for quick scans of individual URLs, and reputation indicators embedded in browser extensions. No single tool is perfect. Used together they can help you decide whether a page is worth trusting.

Scams are everywhere

Regardless of whether you’re browsing or hosting, it helps to understand why these tools exist. Fraud remains one of the most common crimes in the UK, with around 40 per cent of all recorded crime classed as fraud. Criminals use phishing sites and automated scams to mimic banks, governments, shops, and charities so that people volunteer their personal details without realising anything is amiss. 

Some of these schemes are linked to sophisticated phishing kits that have been sold on encrypted messaging platforms and used to defraud victims of millions of pounds. Recent reporting also highlights significant losses to online fraud across the board, including nearly £629 million lost in just six months to various types of scams. Tools that help verify a site’s legitimacy are part of a wider push to make the internet less hospitable to fraudsters. Read on to find our ranking of the best tools around.

1) Guardio

Guardio focuses on prevention rather than post incident diagnosis. Installed as a browser extension, it evaluates websites, links, and emails as you encounter them, rather than after you have already clicked through. It checks for known scam infrastructure, suspicious redirects, and behavioural patterns associated with phishing and fake shops.

What distinguishes it in practice is consistency. The same alerts appear whether the risk comes from a search result, a promoted link, or an unexpected email. For users who do not want to juggle multiple tools or interpret technical scores, this unified feedback is often easier to act on than raw reputation data.

2) Google Safe Browsing

Google Safe Browsing is a kind of background application included in some popular web browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. This service checks the websites you are accessing against huge lists of web pages known to be malicious, either for phishing or spreading malicious software. Upon a match, the browser shows a notification before accessing the webpage. This functionality works in the background and can help prevent more than a million malicious web pages daily. You can also check the trustworthiness of a particular URL by using the transparency report.

3) ScamAdviser

ScamAdviser  will give users a website’s risk score based on certain algorithm computations that check the age of the site, the owner’s details, traffic data, as well as information on threat lists. It aims to assist consumers on whether the site that they are visiting is a scam site or a legitimate one. It is important to note that not all scammers are created equal since one might consider that these reputation services sometimes do not give correct scores to all sites, especially those that are less common.

4) ESET Link Checker

ESET offers a free link checking tool that takes a single URL and tests it against known threat intelligence for phishing, scams, and malware. This quick check is practical when you receive a link in a message or see an unfamiliar address in search results. It gives an immediate indication of whether a site is flagged as dangerous or suspicious.

5) Reputation and blocklist scanners

Other independent reputation checkers, such as URLVoid, let you scan a website across many blocklist services and reputation engines. They compile information from multiple sources to show whether a site appears on lists used by security researchers and networks of threat indicators. This can give you a more nuanced view of a site’s history before you engage with it.

Browser extensions for real-time feedback

A number of browser add-ons can show you safety information as you browse. Some draw on Google Safe Browsing APIs or other threat lists to warn you before a site loads. Extensions that report trust scores or block known malicious pages can reduce the cognitive load of making safety decisions manually, though you should read their privacy practices and permissions carefully before installing them.

Check manually too

Technology is only part of the story. Even when a tool reports a site is safe, you should still check for signs of legitimacy yourself. Government advice points out that even secure connections (the padlock icon in the address bar or “https”) only guarantee that the connection is encrypted, not that the site itself is trustworthy. Look for clear contact information, a coherent privacy policy, and a business identity that matches independent records. New domains with hidden ownership or scant history merit more scrutiny, not less.